Thursday, August 27, 2015

I stumbled across an article today that challenges
Christians to answer 10 questions logically and rationally.The author supposes that these
questions pose contradictions that are unanswerable from a Christian or
theistic worldview.He asserts
that these questions can only be answered logically if we assume that God is
imaginary.

I found it striking that even in his posing these 10
questions, the author borrowed the presuppositions of a theistic
worldview.That is, his questions
assume truths that can only exist if there is a God, who serves as the ultimate
standard of good.

Here are his 10 questions:

1)Why
won't God heal amputees?

2)Why
are there so many starving people in our world?

3)Why
does God demand the death of so many innocent people in the Bible?

4)Why
does the Bible contain so much anti-scientific nonsense?

5)Why
is God such a huge proponent of slavery in the Bible?

6)Why
do bad things happen to good people?

7)Why
didn't any of Jesus' miracles in the Bible leave behind any evidence?

8)How
do we explain the fact that Jesus has never appeared to you?

9)Why
would Jesus want you to eat his body and drink his blood?

10)Why do
Christians get divorced at the same rate as non-Christians?

Our temptation may be to immediately launch into an
apologetic answer to each question.I believe that a better approach would be to challenge the
presuppositions behind the questions, presuppositions which are foreign to the
worldview of the author.With each
question, the author assumes things that can only exist if God exists.

The first thing that a number of these questions assume is
that there is an objective standard of morality.The author appeals to the concept of innocence in numerous questions.In his comments on question #2, he writes, “Why would God be
worried about you getting a raise, while at the same time ignoring the prayers
of these desperate, innocent little children?”Question 3 is similar.Perhaps the author has not considered that the concept of innocence
depends upon an objective standard of morality, which has no place in an
atheistic world.How can someone
or something be innocent if there is no transcendent law?There must be absolute right and wrong
in order to declare someone innocent or guilty.The atheist has no objective source for right and wrong.

Some atheists have argued that morality is a function of
convention.That is, morality consists
of generally accepted principles that people have agreed upon over time.For the sake of argument, let’s assume
that is correct.If that is the
case, then what is right and wrong for one society might not be the same as
right and wrong in another society.And if that is the case, one society cannot impose its version of right
and wrong upon another.Morality
is relative to a specific community.This does not help the atheists argument against the biblical
community.This is because in the
biblical community, there is no such thing as an innocent person (Rom 3:10-18),
that is, this is an agreed upon principle of morality. Therefore the author of the article, who
is outside the biblical community, has no business imposing his sense of morality
upon the biblical community.

This relativistic concept of morality would seem to
completely absolve Nazi Germany of all their many atrocities.After all, the mistreatment, ostracism,
imprisonment, and murder of countless Jews were based upon generally agreed
upon principles regarding the relative worth of Arians versus non-Arians.Who are any of us to question moral
principles that the Germans agreed upon among themselves?And yet, modern atheists frequently use
Nazi Germany as an example of pure evil inconsistent with the existence of a
loving God.They universally
deplore the actions of the Germans, contrary to their own worldview.

Atheists may claim that morality is relative, but they
cannot live that way.There is
inside of them an awareness of absolute right and wrong, which is why they
naturally condemn those who violate that standard.By posing questions that appeal to morality, the author of
the article undermines his own worldview and assumes tenets of the worldview he
seeks to disprove.To the atheist,
the material world is all that exists, and the material world cannot account
for morality.Only in a theistic
world does absolute morality make any sense.

Next time we’ll discover other things assumed by the author
that cannot exist in an atheistic world.Until then consider that when unbelievers try to appeal to morality to
dispute a theistic worldview, we should not allow them to borrow truths that
only make sense in a theistic world.

No comments:

sitemeter

Welcome!

Providence Bible Fellowship is a reformed church near Cincinnati in West Chester, Ohio. The purpose of this blog is to edify the body of Christ through the writings of our elders and teachers. We pray that you will be blessed by it.Click hereto visit our website.